ACORE Panelists Call for ‘New Era’ in Energy Policy

A “new era of thinking” is needed to respond to the rising level of reliability risk facing grid operators, former FERC Chair Neil Chatterjee said in a webinar hosted by the American Council on Renewable Energy about the summer reliability landscape.

Chatterjee — now chief government affairs officer at climate technology developer Palmetto — was joined on the May 15 panel by Karen Onaran, CEO of the Electricity Consumers Resource Council; Devin Hartman, a senior fellow at R Street; and NERC Senior Engineer Stephen Coterillo, who shared details on the ERO’s recently released 2025 Summer Reliability Assessment. (See NERC Warns Summer Shortfalls Possible in Multiple Regions…)

Responding to Onaran, Hartman acknowledged the urgency of the near future but emphasized that utilities and regulators must not take their minds off the long term.

“We in the industry always have these … seasonal discussions about [how] things are looking in the months ahead,” Hartman said. “The truth is, the way that this industry moves at the policy level and the way investment decisions or changes in the system are made, it typically takes years to get changes made, and then years before the affected industry can respond to [them]. So, it’s always important to be looking for the long-term reliability trends and getting the apparatus correctly calibrated to expected conditions down the road.”